The Jourbinas went underground when they realized there was no way for them to gain legal status. One day immigration officers arrived to try to deport the family. All four have been fighting for recognition from the U.S. government ever since.

Natalia Jourbina thought the Facebook update from her little sister at her nearby Bronx apartment was a joke: “Arrested,” it said.

It wasn’t. Before long, immigration authorities had arrived at Jourbina’s Bronx apartment too. They slapped on handcuffs and led her to a waiting car, where her mom and dad – Tatiana and Boris – and her sister Polina were already shackled.

It was October 23, 2009. Since then, the members of the Jourbina family have been involved in a one-of-a-kind legal fight, trying to get the government to recognize their unique status as vulnerable stateless people. But they fear they could forever be in legal limbo.

The family came to the United States in the early 1990s on Soviet passports, fleeing what Boris, 66, Tatiana, 51, Natalia, 31 and Polina, 25 say was discrimination against ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan and threats of death. But immigration officials said they didn’t meet the high standard of persecution necessary to gain asylum. Their petition was rejected and the Jourbinas couldn’t renew their Soviet passports to leave the country.

Natalia Jourbina holds up her phone for her daughter for a video chat with friends.

The family came to the US in the early 1990s on Soviet passports, fleeing what the family says was discrimination against ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan and threats of death. But immigration officials denied their asylum requests.

Natalia and her family went underground after their petition for asylum was rejected and the Jourbinas couldn’t renew their Soviet passports to leave the country.

Now the family, trying to give their daughter a normal life, as they fight their case in court.

Natalia married an American citizen and started a family. She worries what will become of her daughter if she is not granted citizenship.

The US government has tried to deport the Jourbinas to Russia or Kazakhstan, but neither country recognizes them. Leaving the US with no place to send them.

Natalia's husband and daughter look at fireworks at Coney Island. If separated from the family, they will be left in the US as citizens.

Although not being held in immigration detention, they are forced to constantly check in with immigration officials and are given a discretionary work permit. Like most stateless people in this situation, because they can’t get travel documents they also can’t leave the United States. “It’s like we don’t exist,” says Polina.

So like many stateless people in the United States, the Journbinas simply went underground. Polina continued with her education and went to college. Natalia became a manager at a local clothing shop.

Then in 2009, the immigration authorities arrived. Officials have since tried to deport the family to Kazakhstan and Russia, but failed. The Russian government says the Chechnyan birth records of Boris, 66, and Tatiana 51, were destroyed in armed conflict, meaning there is no proof of their Russian citizenship. The Kazakh government says that because the Jourbinas never registered with the Kazakh consulate in the United States, the entire family has been stripped of its citizenship.

That leaves all four stateless. Although not being held in immigration detention, they are forced to constantly check in with immigration officials and are given a discretionary work permit. Like most stateless people in this situation, because they can’t get travel documents they also can’t leave the United States. “It’s like we don’t exist,” says Polina. “We are just nothing in the system. Nobody even sees us as real people.”

Last year pro-bono lawyers from Catholic Charities managed to reopen the asylum case in federal court after arguing that judges previously followed incorrect procedure. They think this is a groundbreaking case that could open the way for other stateless people to gain asylum. But it could take years before the situation is decided. In the meantime the family lives in limbo.
Natalia is hoping to get permanent residency and eventually citizenship. But although she’s been married to an American citizen since 2007, that isn’t simple either. Officials say she must leave the country and re-enter it to be considered, because she previously failed to follow the deportation order.

“How am I supposed to do that?” she asks. “I can’t even get a travel document.” Says her mother, Tatiana: “I see no future for us. I see this continuing forever.”

Miliyon was stripped of his Ethiopian citizenship after protesting his father’s deportation to Eritrea. He decided to flee to the United States, leaving his family behind. The U.S. was supposed to be his safe haven, but soon he realized that it was anything but.

When Miliyon paid a smuggler to bring him from Ethiopia to the United States using a fake passport, he thought he was leaving danger for a life in a better place. Instead he entered a life of extreme hardship.

Despite being stripped of his Ethiopian citizenship because of his Eritrean ethnicity and political activity in Ethiopia, the 41-year-old, who lives in Maryland in a small community near Washington DC, has seen his application for asylum denied and has since entered a world of limbo. He lives in a local flophouse and works 80 hour weeks at a local gas station in order to barely make ends meet, but he has no work permit and no way to receive one.

Nobody knows exactly how many people in Miliyon’s situation exist in the United States. Following wars in Eritrea and Ethiopia in the late 1990s, Eritrea expelled and stripped thousands of its citizens of Ethiopian origin of their citizenship. Ethiopia did the same. Experts say that some people like Miliyon have found out about the true depth of their situation only after checking in with embassies while working abroad. They are permanently stateless.

Miliyon escaped from his homeland of Ethiopia, but because of his Eritrean ancestry, he was stripped of his citizenship during a protracted war between the neighboring nations. “I protested and they arrested me and beat me.... They treated my father very badly and my mother begged me to go,” says Miliyon.

As a stateless person, Miliyon can work in the U.S. by acquiring an expensive yearly work permit, but he can only obtain one after being documented by the government, which requires being arrested by Homeland Security and spending six months in a federal detention center. He'd lose his current job, home and most of his possessions in the process.

Life is an endless cycle of work, a few hours of sleep and work again. Seven days a week, Miliyon logs 75-85 hours of work at near minimum wage.

Miliyon lives below the radar in a D.C.-area flophouse with other immigrants trying to scrape by, some illegal and some legal.

Since coming to the US, Miliyon has worked a series of low wage jobs.

Miliyon often works 12-hour shifts, seven days a week at a local gas station. “This is my uniform. I take it off at night and put it on in the morning,” he says as he neatly lays his gas station work shirt over the back of a sofa after a long day.

He never goes out, doesn't indulge in fancy meals or seeing movies, but instead saves as much as possible to pay lawyers and court fees to pursue a request for asylum.

Miliyon and his small team of attorneys at Washington and Lee University think that the only way for Miliyon to get legal work permission would be for him to be detained by by the Department of Homeland Security. Under U.S. law he’d have to be released within six months when officials realize they can’t deport him anywhere. But that would also mean Miliyon loses his job, his place to live and everything he has.

In the meantime Miliyon dreams of a country to call his own. But it seems impossible. The Ethiopian government deported Miliyon’s father, a former Ethiopian government official, to Eritrea after conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea broke out in the late 1990s. When Miliyon protested the move, he says security officials detained and beat him before stripping his citizenship. His mother urged him to leave and set him up with a smuggler and and fake Ethiopian travel documents, which he used to get a U.S. visa. He arrived at Washington Dulles airport and was let into the country.

But now Miliyon wishes he had his old life back. Ethiopian embassy officials have told him that they no longer recognize him as an Ethiopian national. The Eritrean government says he can’t prove a connection to the country. He’s stuck here.

Over the last few years, Miliyon’s father died of illness in Ethiopia and his brother killed himself. Miliyon still tries to support his mother in Ethiopia, while struggling to make ends meet. But he knows he’ll never see her again. Miliyon can’t get a travel document and can’t ever leave the country.

Most days, Miliyon comes home from gas station attendant job and collapses onto the sofa. He leafs through his immigration documents: reams and reams of petitions, appeals and rejections. He tries to avoid thinking of what immigration detention might be like. Like many stateless people, he knows it’s a matter of time before federal authorities come for him.

When the United States colonized American Samoa at the beginning of the 20th century it left the locals with no citizenship at all. Today American Samoans are considered to be U.S. “nationals” but not citizens.

Taffy-lei T. Maene first realized she wasn’t a U.S. citizen when her employer with the Washington state government asked her for her work authorization documents. She showed them her U.S. passport and was called into a small office.

“They fired me right there,” Maene says.

As U.S. “nationals” American Samoans have a unique quasi-stateless status. Without citizenship rights, tens of thousands of American Samoans are at risk of experiencing something similar to Maene.

In order to convert their nationality to citizenship they have to move to Hawaii or the mainland United States, live there for three months and then go through a byzantine naturalization process that can take months or years. Without citizenship they’re denied basic rights offered to all Americans, such as voting while on the mainland or applying to work in many government jobs, among other disadvantages.

There are at least 4,000 stateless people in the United States. In order to offer them relief, Congress would have to modify U.S. immigration law.

A groundbreaking lawsuit on the issue, launched by frustrated American Samoans, is currently winding its way through the federal courts. But in the meantime, community leaders are upset. In addition to the indignity of “Americans,” many of whom have served in the U.S. military, being forced to prove that they deserve citizenship to the federal government, the complexity of the naturalization process angers many.

“It is absolutely wrong,” says Chief Loa Pele Faletogo, President of the Samoan Federation of America, a Carson, Calif.-based community organization that has joined the lawsuit. “We are as American as anyone else and deserve citizenship at birth.”

Congress has shown little interest in tackling the issue and American Samoan government leaders have spoken out against the lawsuit, arguing that it could put American Samoa’s unique traditions, such as its communal land ownership structure, in jeopardy. The lawsuit’s success could open the door to constitutional challenges of local traditions and birthright citizenship itself could be a slippery slope, they say.

Those traditions have their roots in the United States’ unique relationship with American Samoa – in the early 20th century American officials brought the territory under its control, while preventing American Samoans from gaining birthright citizenship.

Carson, California is home to one of the largest populations of American Samoans outside of the territory.

Young Samoans attend a Flag Day ceremony in Carson. Under US law, anyone born on US soil is automatically a citizen, however the territory of American Samoa is the only territory excluded from the law.

American Samoans are among the highest population groups to join the military. During the most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan they also have had some the highest causality rates as well.

Esera Mamoe served in the military and like many American Samoan veterans, is not a US citizen.

Mamoe says he refused to take a test and go through the naturalization process out of protest and feels his service should be enough to prove his loyalty.

Mamoe's wife did not know he was not a citizen until she asked him to come vote with her. "You can't vote? But that's not fair."

Mamoe came to the mainland with his parents, who were very involved in the care of churches. All Samoan’s are Christians and in every village, resident will be seen dressing in their Sunday best and heading off to church., according to the territory's visitor bureau.

The church plays a prominent role for American Samoans on the mainland. Congregations like this one in Los Angeles, are where families discuss community matters and form opinions on issues like the citizenship lawsuit.

The church can also serve as their connection back to the island. Some still have family land and talk to friends and relatives about what citizenship may bring.

Johnny Siliga sits down to a dinner prayer before eating and talking about the news of the day with family. National status and what it means for veterans like Siliga comes up, with the lawsuit pending, it's a common topic for the community.

American Samoan chief Loa Pele Faletogo joined the lawsuit and hopes to see citizenship granted. He naturalized to become a citizen, but believes the process is unfair, expensive, too lengthy and insulting to those who send their children to serve in the military.

That’s hogwash, believes Esera Mamoe, a 61-year-old California-based community organizer with American nationality, who has served in the U.S. Marines but refuses to go through a naturalization process. People born on other U.S. territories, such as Guam and Puerto Rico gain citizenship automatically, so why should the same be true for American Samoans.

“Why should I have to naturalize?” he asks. “This is like my own government telling me I don”t matter.”

Maria Jakab was born and raised in Poland, but her foster parents had to fight a fifteen-year legal battle for her to receive citizenship.

There’s one thing known for sure about Maria Jakab: She was born on March 16, 1997 on a cold spring day in Sandomierz, Poland. For the doctors and nurses her birth was routine. They asked her mother for her hometown and dutifully wrote it in the hospital records: “Brasov, Romania.”

Five days later Maria’s mother walked out of the hospital and never returned, dropping the little girl into the hands of the state and years of legal wrangling over her citizenship. Children born in Poland only automatically receive Polish citizenship if a parent is Polish or both the parents are “unknown.” According to Maria’s birth certificate, her mother was known and Romanian.

However under Romanian law, an entry on a birth certificate isn’t enough proof to grant Romanian citizenship. Both countries denied her right to citizenship and she was rendered stateless, untethered to any nation.

Accurate statistics for stateless people are hard to come by and no one knows exactly how many children fall into these sorts of gaps in European nations. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees reports that one third of all stateless people worldwide are children, and it’s likely thousands of those are in Europe.

If birth parents simply disappear, like in Maria’s case, it can be difficult to prove what citizenship a child should have. Such children can face all sorts of problems, from trouble getting basic health care to problems enrolling in school or being unable to travel.

There are about 10,000 stateless people in Poland. Advocates want the country to introduce more safeguards to prevent abandoned children born to foreign parents from becoming stateless.

“At some stage they will start to question who am I and where do I belong?” says Laura van Waas, a lawyer and researcher at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and one of the authors of a recently published report on childhood statelessness. “It is about having the right to be recognized as a member of a community.”

Advocates believe that cases like Maria’s, which have triggered outrage by the Polish public, point to the need for changes in EU citizenship laws. In Poland, the ombudsman for children’s issues, Marek Michalak, has asked the government to make it easier for guardians of a child to apply for Polish nationality. But Dorota Pudzianowska, an attorney with the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights in Warsaw who worked on Maria’s case, believes the issue remains largely ignored and isn’t improving.

“I think that this may only be the beginning,” said Pudzianowska, who is aware of at least three similar cases in Poland right now.

Immediate problems

Marek and Elzbieta Rutyna, a married couple from Tarnobrzeg, didn’t know any of this when they got a call in 1999 from a local orphanage with news that would fulfill their long-held dream of being foster parents for a baby girl. “We wanted a girl and when the orphanage contacted us, we immediately took the offer,” Elzbieta remembers.

No state was willing to accept Maria Jakab as a citizen until influential people lobbied Poland’s president on her behalf. There are still missing safeguards in Polish law which can allow other children to become stateless.

When the Rutynas tried to change Maria’s last name to match their own, they ran into immediate problems with Polish authorities.

“They told us they couldn’t make a decision on Maria’s case because she’s not Polish,” remembers Marek. They would soon discover that in the eyes of the law, Maria had no citizenship at all.

During a visit to the Romanian embassy in Warsaw, officials refused to confirm her citizenship, saying both Maria’s biological mother and father had to make official statements. But nobody knew where either of them had gone.

So the family pushed harder with local authorities in Poland. They wondered if officially adopting the little girl would solve everything and grant her Polish citizenship automatically. But a Polish judge advised against it, taking them aside and urging the family to stop. The judge told them Maria could fix everything herself when she became older, but if they kept pushing the issue, the little girl might be deported to Romania.

“The last thing you want is for your kid to be taken away,” Marek said. “So we did nothing at all.”

As Maria grew up, the Rutynas tried to protect her by avoiding telling to her about her complicated situation. But as much as they tried to shield her, Maria remembers the constant feeling that something was wrong. With every class trip she sat out, with every denied request to visit her father when he worked construction jobs in Germany and Cyprus, with every funny look from her peers, she began to wonder what was wrong with her.

“You look different. You have a different name than your parents. People look at you differently,” the now 17-year-old Maria said. “My parents just told me that I had a problem getting a passport. Back then I didn’t understand. I just always asked my parents, ‘Why can’t I visit Dad?’”

“For some time I wasn’t feeling like myself,” Maria says. Riding her scooter gave her comfort – one thing she felt she could control.

In 2009, the family requested the government officially give Maria citizenship. “We simply hoped that someone would have understanding for our situation,” Marek said.

The application was rejected, Maria never had Polish citizenship and was actually Romanian officials said, presenting a document from Romanian authorities saying Maria’s mother existed. Romania responded by still refusing to grant her citizenship.

As a last resort, the family applied for a residence permit to at least legalize Maria’s stay in Poland, but without any identification, officials refused to grant the permit.

Lawyers step in

In 2012, Dorota Pudzianowska and the Helsinki Foundation decided to take on the case. “It’s impossible for people affected by such a situation to deal with it by themselves,” Pudzianowska said. With the help of an international legal firm they tried once more to get citizenship from Romania but were rebuffed.

“From that point it was clear for us, that Maria has to be considered stateless”, Pudzianowska recalls.

Maria with her Polish ID. After 17 years she was finally granted citizenship.

She and a team of attorneys worked on the case and made here status as a stateless person the lynchpin of a new application for citizenship. Usually such applications are a few pages long, but Maria’s became a massive book.

The case dragged on for months as Polish media began to cover the case, creating a storm of outrage. Finally, the family and their lawyers applied directly to the Polish president to award Maria citizenship and Marek’s old school-friend, parliamentarian Jan Warzecha, offered his help.

A few months later, in August 2014, a certificate with the Polish seal arrived in the mail. Maria was now a citizen of Poland, and says she is looking forward to her own passport. As soon as she has it, she says she wants to forget her nightmare and visit her brother in England.

Marek and Elzbieta though can’t forget what the family has been through. They want to tackle this problem in Poland once and for all. “We just want to help others who are in our situation,” Marek said.

A brief trip to a South Pacific island and a weird quirk in U.S. immigration nearly left Mikhail Sebastian stuck forever.

Mikhail Sebastian takes a deep breath in his tiny Los Angeles apartment before he starts to tell his story: “It was only supposed to be a vacation,” he begins haltingly. “But it turned into a lost year of my life.” Sebastian takes another breath before continuing with his story. He frowns and shakes his head. This is painful for him: “I worry every day that I’ll one day be back in that situation again. It’s my worst nightmare.”

Every time Sebastian explains how was nearly permanently stuck on a tiny South Pacific tropical island because of a weird quirk in U.S. immigration between 2012 and 2013, the feelings flow back, he says. The fear. The isolation. The helplessness. “I tell my story because I don’t want this to happen to anyone else,” Sebastian says. “I want this problem to be fixed.”

Because Sebastian’s story has created a minor political firestorm in the United States, he is perhaps the best known person in the United States’ tiny community of stateless people – people with no citizenship whatsoever.

Sebastian’s story starts out as a typical one in the strange world of stateless people in the United States. Originally born in the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, but of Armenian ethnicity, he came to the Houston, Texas in 1995 on a still-valid Soviet passport as an assistant to a businessman. But because, he says, he faced oppression for being gay back home, Sebastian decided to stay in the United States and apply for asylum. His application was rejected by immigration authorities.

There are at least 4,000 stateless people in the United States. In order to offer them relief, Congress would have to modify U.S. immigration law.

“They said I didn’t have a convincing enough fear of persecution,” Sebastian recalls. But there was no way for him to return to Azerbaijan. His U.S.S.R. passport had no expired and when Sebastian asked the embassy of Azerbaijan, he was rebuffed without explanation – he believes it is because of his Armenian background. Then Armenia turned him down as did the Russian embassy. U.S. officials arrested Sebastian and tried to deport him. But when they realized no country would accept him, he was released. Sebastian was stateless.

Like many stateless people in his situation, Sebastian was given a work permit and told to check in with immigration authorities periodically. That’s what he did for years as he worked as a travel agent and then a coffee barista in Los Angeles.

But then in 2011 he decided to take a tropical vacation to the island paradise of American Samoa. That was where his story became positively bizarre. “It makes me so sad to remember it,” Sebastian says. “Just thinking about it gives me nightmares.”

Sebastian vacationed around the island of about 50,000 people, laying on the beach, visiting tropical jungles and, despite not having a valid passport, even taking a jaunt to the neighboring independent country of Samoa. But when he arrived at the local airport for his Hawaiian Airlines flight back to Los Angeles, officials stopped him.

“You’ve deported yourself off the mainland,” Sebastian recalls being told. Because of American Samoa’s unique relationship to the United States – it runs its own immigration system – Sebastian was told that he was stuck.

To get to work each day Mikhail Sebastian rides the bus for just shy of two hours, from his sparse apartment along a busy street in Hollywood to a swanky beach side cafe. As a stateless person jobs are scarce, as his work permit scares away potential employers.

For the next few months, local officials tried to figure out what to do with him. Because Sebastian didn’t have a local work permit, he couldn’t get a job. And because he couldn’t work, Sebastian ran out of money and couldn’t pay for a hotel. So officials put him with a local family and gave him an allowance of about $50 per week. Sebastian lost his coffee barista job in Los Angeles. His landlord revoked the lease on his apartment.

The American Samoan Congressional delegation became involved, writing angry letters to the United States’ Department of Homeland Security demanding that Sebastian be let back to Los Angeles. Authorities wouldn’t budge. Then the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and one of the top statelessness attorneys in the country took on Sebastian’s case. Even officials at Hope College in Michigan advocated for Sebastian.

Officials refused to listen. It looked like Sebastian might really be permanently stuck on American Samoa and he was getting desperate. Most days he could be found at the local McDonalds sending emails to government officials begging them to help him. Usually he received no response. “I’m contemplating suicide every day,” Sebastian told a reporter in mid-2012, describing how the tropical heat made him sick. “I just want to go back to my friends. I want to go back to what I know. I want to have a life.”

Mikhail Sebastian has lived in the US for almost two decades without an identity.

As a stateless person in the US he's unable to work without an expensive yearly work permit. With such income instability, he saves money by riding buses and walking in Los Angeles.

Sebastian works in a coffee shop about an hour and a half hour bus ride away from his apartment. Employers aren't always willing to take on a new hire who may not be allowed to work in a year when there permit expires, but Sebastian says his boss is aware of his situation and supportive.

The coffee shop also gives him something he feels sorely lacking, the chance to talk to people like a normal person. "I don't tell everyone," Sebastian says about his interactions with customers. "You don't want to be stateless all of the time."

Throughout his day, Sebastian can be found with his phone to his ear; he checks in with immigration officers in Los Angeles on the status of his asylum case.

Through a loophole in the legal system, his exile in American Samoa made him eligible to apply for asylum again.

"It feels like limbo all over again" he says about the waiting while comparing it to when his first asylum attempt was denied. He had expected a decision in March 2014 and by early November was still waiting.

Sebastian stops to have a smoke outside one of his favorite Thai food restaurants. "The food is very good and they are very nice here," he says before walking in and being greeted by the owner. He is a regular here and the staff is aware of his status. They ask him for updates and with a sigh he shakes his head.

Sebastian spends his evening at home watching a movie or eating out, he doesn't cook much he says.

The frustration gets to him at quite times, he says he doesn't like being alone and tries to have an active social life to keep his mind off his legal status.

As the government sorts out his status and makes a decision, Sebastian waits. Calling in daily for updates and staying diligent.

Said Vincent Kruse, an attorney with the American Samoan Attorney General’s Office in 2012: “We’re getting used to the idea that Mikhail might be with us for a very long time.” Sebastian remembers being terrified that he would never get off the tiny island – he saw no way to get off. “I might have been stuck in the United States too, but at least I can travel around a bit,” he recalls. “Imagine being marooned on an island like I was. It turns from paradise to horror when you realize you are basically imprisoned on what becomes a jail for you.”

After months of publicity and increasingly angry protests by U.S.-based human rights activists, in February 2012, the Department of Homeland Security gave Sebastian a special “humanitarian parole” to come back to the United States. But it has been a difficult readjustment for Sebastian. Authorities have allowed him to reapply for asylum, but they’ve refused to grant him a work permit, forcing Sebastian to work illegally.

For more than a year advocates for Mikhail Sebastian battled with the U.S. government to get him back to the United States. These are a selection of letters from the American Samoan delegate to Congress, the Department of Homeland Security and the American Samoan Attorney General outlining his case.

Most days he can be found working at a Los Angeles-area coffee shop where the owner has taken pity on him and lets him work under the table. But Sebastian has grown from frustrated about his situation to sad and then to angry. He may not be stuck on a stifling island, but he is still stuck in the United States with no way to leave. Sebastian wants to help other stateless people and has even become an activist of sorts. He wants to get legal residency and one day citizenship. Or he wants to go to some country, anywhere that will accept him, that will finally tell him that he belongs.

“I don’t want this to happen to anyone else,” he says. “But it will, unless I do something.” Last year he began writing about his situation, even getting published in the Washington Post, one of the country’s most prestigious newspapers. But still nothing has changed for Sebastian. He remains a man without a country – and a man with no way to leave the country.

Change can’t come soon enough for Sebastian, who insists that he won’t ever give up fighting for himself or the rights of stateless people. When he goes to work he’s always watching for immigration officials. Although he’s technically not an illegal immigrant, Sebastian knows he’s not in the United States legally either. He’s a man in limbo, a sort of blank nothingness. An officer can show up at his workplace at any time to put him in immigration detention again.

After work each day Sebastian calls the immigration office to check on the status of his asylum case. Just like his own life, the case is in limbo. He calls every day but there’s never any news. “Try back tomorrow,” an immigration official tells Sebastian over the phone. “Maybe something will change by then.”

Update: In November 2014, after this story was published, Sebastian was granted asylum, finally giving him a pathway to legal U.S. status.

His father is from Palestine, his mother from Syria – but Said Alnahawi has no nationality whatsoever. Like thousands of ethnic Palestinians around the European Union, he has become a legal ghost. Palestine doesn’t accept him as citizen nor does the country he grew up in – Syria. And Germany doesn’t do a thing to help him out of his despair.

Said Alnahawi holds up his German temporary residence permit; under the section for his nationality it is only marked “XXX.”

Said Alnahawi has been pacing around the German city of Darmstadt almost every day for the last year, trying to think of a way out of his predicament. He has left Syria, a country at war that nobody wants to return to. But Germany, the country he escaped to, doesn’t want him either.

One evening in February 2012, Alnahawi was on his way home in Damascus, Syria riding a bus through the dark streets during a power outage. Soldiers motioned to the bus driver to halt as they approached a checkpoint. They swept through the passengers, checking IDs.

“Then, suddenly I realized we were taking bullets from nowhere,” Alnahawi recalls. “We looked all around but couldn’t make out where they came from. The soldiers had to return fire … I was scared for my life.”

Six months later he was in Germany to get follow up treatment for a chronic birth defect and visit his half-sister when his mother called. Alnahawhi had been to Germany many times before for similar treatment, but this time was different.

Alnahawi overstayed on his visa and soon he was on German authorities’ radar for deportation, but where to?

When his tourist visa ran out in March 2013, Alnahawi decided to stay in Germany. Unsure of what to do with him, officials suspended deportation for six months. That’s when Alnahawi started pacing through the city center every day, moving through the shadows of buildings as his case slowly moved through the legal system.

Alnahawi was soon on German authorities’ radar for deportation, but as he and immigration officers learned, there was no state to return him to.

Growing up, Alnahawi says, he never really had any problems. But he was never Syrian. Syria only recognizes citizenship from a subject’s paternal side; Alnahawi was born to a Syrian mother and a Palestinian father, making him Palestinian in the government’s eyes. He was registered as a Palestinian refugee in Syria and issued special refugee status. When he arrived in Germany, however, he realized that the fact that he was ethnic Palestinian – a country largely unrecognized by world governments – made him stateless.

A fact unknown to Alnahawi at this point: Stateless people are granted special rights in Germany. The country has acceded to two UN conventions on statelessness which guarantee people with no citizenship a pathway to legalization. The state however has put the burden of proof on the immigrants – apparently to avoid fraudulent claims of stateless status. In Said’s case, the immigration authorities decided not to decide directly – and put the administrative term “undecided nationality” in his papers.

He’s never been to Palestine, let alone gotten a passport or even known how to get one. No one knows how to classify him.

Said feels that his life in Germany is on hold while his legal status is clarified.

Even though Germany has agreed to a UN convention regarding the reduction of statelessness, there are more than 11,000 stateless people in Germany and more than 30,000 with undetermined nationality.

“I‘ve always felt like a Syrian,” Alnahawi says while shaking his head. But he’s not one.

“I grew up in Damascus, I am Syrian. I speak Arabic with a Syrian dialect,” Alnahawi says, “for me the term stateless just means helpless.”

There are an estimated 100,000 Palestinians living in the European Union, according to the European Commission. Some Palestinians manage to get legal status, but many others roam around quasi-legally for years. Because of Palestine’s disputed status, even proof of Palestinian residency or a passport doesn’t help; not that this would have applied to Alnahawi, who has neither. Alnahawi presents a special challenge to Germany, caught between the non-choices of deportation to an active war zone and the legal gumbo of the disputed status of Palestine. German attorney Thomas Oberhäuser believes there may be hope for people like him yet. He points out that Germany has implemented the two key UN conventions on statelessness.

Alnawhi could go through an onerous legal process to prove that no state will accept him as a citizen, which might give him a claim to German residency, but that, according to Oberhäuser could take months or years. Germany is not one of the eight European Union countries that have a streamlined “statelessness determination procedure” that can help decide such cases quickly.

With the aid of Amnesty International, Alnahawi has received a one year residence permit to continue with his studies in Germany while he waits for a resolution.

He dreams of permanent residency, and maybe even getting a German passport one day. But when it comes to his nationality, officials still haven’t made a decision. So for now, he paces the city and waits in Germany’s legal limbo, with nowhere to go.

His ID card says his nationality is “XXX.” Alnawhi is like a ghost.

A mosque in Darmstadt's industrial district. Said found it on one of his long strolls around the city.

"I felt like I need religion in my life", Said says. He prays for his family and his home country.

Said wants to start in Darmstadt anew. But a lack of legal advice has made this difficult.

Said doesn't understand why he is stateless. "I always felt like a Syrian", Said says.

In Damascus Said studied English literature, pursuing his bachelor studies.

In Germany, Said's life is on hold – until he finds a solution for his legal situation.

Citizens of no-longer-existing countries like the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia are among the most common examples of stateless people today. Tatianna Lesnikova came to the United States from Ukraine hoping to find a better life and eventually send for her son. Now she fears she will die without seeing him again.

Every time she thinks of her son Danil, Tatianna Lesnikova weeps bitter tears. “I’ll never see him again,” the 65-year-old says at her home in Springfied, Massachusetts. “I will have to wait 100 years to see him again.”

There are at least 4,000 stateless people in the United States. In order to offer them relief, Congress would have to modify U.S. immigration law.

Twenty-two years ago, Lesnikova fled Ukraine to the United States convinced that officials there were preparing to commit her to a mental hospital for her anti-government views. They had already done so with her then 19-year-old son Danil.

But when she arrived in the United States with her younger son, 15-year-old David, American authorities immediately denied Lesnikova’s petition for asylum, arguing that her fears of oppression weren’t credible. In 2002, after her final appeal failed, they imprisoned her and David and attempted to deport them.

They couldn’t: David and Tatianna were stateless. Since both are ethnic Russians, Ukraine’s government decreed that they weren’t Ukrainians. Russia also denied them citizenship, saying they hadn’t proven their ties to the country.

After three months, officials released them from detention and into a world of legal limbo.

After marrying a US citizen and enduring a long legal battle, David managed to adjust his status and became a US citizen – a rare feat for a stateless person who the government has tried to deport. Danil escaped from Ukraine and settled into a quiet life as an orthodox Christian priest in Russia.

But Tatianna remains in a stateless limbo. She works as a certified nursing assistant only through a permit from the Department of Homeland Security that could be pulled at any time. She can’t leave the country even though she wants to – because she’s stateless, the government denies her a travel document. There’s likely no way for her to ever legalize her legal status. And she worries that officials could return to detain her arbitrarily at any time.

“I’m stuck here forever,” she says.

After the government made a target of her son for unpatriotic statements, Tatianna Lesnikova fled the former USSR to seek asylum in America. But a new country brought new problems.

With only enough money to bring one of her two sons, she left her older son Danil, left, behind and brought 15-year-old David.

Danil was to join the family within six months, but that did not happen. Meanwhile David grew up American and went on to have his own child.

Lesnikova says she misses cooking for her older son and making his favorite dishes. On weekends she now cooks for her granddaughter.

David lived near his mother and often drops off his daughter to get piano lessons, have lunch and play with grandma.

Lesnikova doesn't like to talk about her status; it worries her family and makes strangers suspect her, she says it's easier not to think about it.

David hasn't seen his brother since he fled with his mother, he doesn't know if he ever will.

As a stateless person, Lesnikova has to check in with immigration officers and ask them for permission to work and travel in the US.

David recently became a citizen after a long petition process. He feels safe, but worries that his mother will be arrested again.

For decades Lesnikova has had a fractured family, one which she doesn't expect to be united. She doesn't have much hope she says.

Lesnikova knows she’s lucky in a way. After all, she does have a work permit and manages to eke out an existence in health care and by teaching the occasional piano class to American students – in Ukraine and Russia, she was a master piano teacher. But she still dreams of Danil each night. He has been repeatedly denied visas to the United States. She dreams of one day holding him like she did when he was a little boy.

“I have battled for years to solve this problem, but I can’t,” she says. “I have lost all hope.”

For many stateless people, living in the shadows is a common thing. Thomas Eshaya spent 30 years in hiding. In the end his lack of nationality became his pathway to citizenship.

Four-year-old Thomas came to Greece with his family from Lebanon.

Thomas Eshaya needed a visa to accompany his wife to Spain for their honeymoon in 2013, but standing in front of the Spanish embassy in Athens, Greece, the old fears came flowing back.

For a moment the gnawing feelings that have followed Eshaya his entire life, a worry that someone might ask him for his ID, that something could go wrong, bubbled to the surface of his mind. In that moment he remembered the very real fear that he could end up in immigration detention if someone were to learn he was in Greece illegally as a stateless man.

Eshaya, a tall and broad-shouldered man with long black hair and 42 years of life weathered into his stature, appeared stoic and confident to the passersby on the street. But inside his mind, a lifetime of feeling incomplete made him unsure and nervous.

If anything went wrong, he had a lot to lose: he has fathered two sons and lived almost his entire life in Greece. As a child, he came as a stateless migrant from war-torn Lebanon and slipped through the cracks of the Greek immigration system, which was less strict than it is today. And although he worked in a factory and as a house painter, he was never able to regularize his status. For more than three decades he survived in the shadows.

Only through the help of a local attorney, Erika Kalantzi, has Eshaya managed to get permission to stay in Greece – something that eludes so many stateless people. Still the fears are far from gone. He’s never been Greek and he still isn’t. And as a stateless man, he knows he’s under the protection of no one.

A life underground

In the past some Greek governments misused their political power to deprive citizens of their Greek nationality. Today, much has changed. Greece has signed the UN convention from 1954 to the status of stateless persons. The UNO estimates that there are only 178 stateless persons in Greece.

How exactly Eshaya became stateless isn’t clear. He thinks his roots may be Palestinian but he’s not sure. His family members thought of themselves as Lebanese, but they don’t have Lebanese papers to prove it. His mother never discussed the situation, or explained what happened or why – and it never occurred to Eshaya to bother to ask her before she died. He felt Greek anyway, he says. There was no reason to question his status.

From documents and the few bits and pieces of family history he could remember about his arrival in Greece, he thinks he was four-years-old when he, his mother and his two brothers left Lebanon — his parents had been separated and his father was out of the picture completely.

It was the early summer of 1977, two years after the start of the civil war. Fighters from the rebel Palestine Liberation Organisation had taken control in southern Lebanon and the western part of the capital city of Beirut and were fighting against the Lebanese Front. Thousands of civilians fled from the heavily armed militias, among them Eshaya and his family.

Since they were not Lebanese citizens, Lebanese authorities would only issue them a so-called “family travel document,” which on the last page explicitly states: “the document does not certify the nationality of its holders.”

The family arrived by boat on Cyprus and moved on to the Greek harbour of Perama. They were first registered by Greek authorities on July 6, 1977, as noted in their travel document. The photo in the document show Eshaya’s mother Fahime with swept-back black hair. Thomas Eshaya, still a boy of four years, is sitting on her lap with a strand of hair jutting over his forehead. His two older brothers sit nearby in wool sweaters.

“It was the beginning of the 1970s, a different time,” Eshaya recalls. “Refugees were exotic, uncommon. That was lucky for us.”

The family received a tourism visa for a year. And when it ran out, a policeman gave them a tip – go underground in Egaleo, a suburb of Athens.

“Only Iraqis and Lebanese lived there,” Eshaya says. “It was like a ghetto.”

That’s where Eshaya spent his childhood and most of his adult life. Though he always felt Greek, he had to be cautious. “I was afraid of being arrested. I knew there was no one to protect me,” he says.

Eshaya was lucky. With his introduction to Greek life at a young age, he quickly learned how to blend in: he had Greek friends, spoke Greek, acted Greek and to the random stranger there was never a reason to doubt he was Greek. That made it possible for him to hide in plain sight. When someone asked, Eshaya would say that he didn’t have an ID with him – and his friends would provide cover.

“It almost felt normal,” he says about how his family learned to live under the radar. Up to the age of ten, Eshaya only spent a year in school because the family was afraid of authorities. His mother worked in a factory and at 16 Eshaya began to work at the same factory, making tin boxes for a honey distributor.

Still he kept away from big gatherings of people or police. He never even considered travel. The years passed. Employers just looked away when Eshaya explained his situation. Sometimes he was able to work legally – in the 1990s it was possible to get a Greek work permit even without a residence permit. He still had a type of identity card: that Lebanese travel document with the expiration date the Lebanese embassy kept extending.

Changing Attitudes

In the 1990s the situation for migrants became tense in Greece as the war in Yugoslavia sent countless refugees over the border. Then in 1996 the Lebanese embassy refused to continue extending Eshaya’s special travel document and he was for the first time completely without papers.

Only a happy coincidence saved Eshaya. Exactly at this time the Greek government began a program to help migrants without residency permits legalize their status and he started searching for legal advice.

His future attorney, Kalantzi, had been doing pro-bono work for some time when she first met Eshaya. She worked as a business lawyer but kept digging into nationality law – because of its appealing complexity, as she says. With her assistance, he prepared an application for the regularization process. Because he had been living and working for years in Greece, he received a residence permit.

On that basis he was able to apply for a new travel document issued by the Greek authorities. He had an ID again – although inside it still labeled him as “stateless..

“I don’t know what I would have done without Erika, she saved us,” Eshaya says. Kalantzi, who is today known as one of the leading experts on statelessness in Greece, also helped one of his elder brothers that stayed in Athens. She’s become a friend of the family.

“The problem of stateless people in Greece is that there is little knowledge about their situation and problems,” Kalantzi says. “The government and administration sometimes have just been unable to cope with the complexity of the individual cases.”

Nevertheless, she thinks the government is doing its best to help in cases like like Eshaya’s – Kalantzi has managed to help several stateless people achieve legal status over the last few years.

Eshaya still lives in Egaleo on the upper floor of a rowhouse. From the terrace, Athens glitters brightly. The capital city has almost completely enveloped tiny Egaleo.

He glances over the cityscape, over his own small home he and his family so caringly built over the years. “Today I’m free,” Eshaya says. He goes to football games and no longer has to hurry back home when a protest brings the police out. He has also received the visa for Spain and dreams of further trips with his wife and sons.

He still cannot move about as easily as Greeks with full citizenship who can easily travel within European borders, but he has applied to be a naturalized citizen through a special process for stateless people. “When everything goes well, I’ll soon be Greek,” Eshaya says, shrugging. After all the steps he took, all the fears and hardships, it is the last missing piece. “I don’t have to be afraid anymore,” he says.